Take Care With Your Words

Have you noticed how careless we have become with our use of words? So many times someone will say, "I hate fill-in-the-blank". when all they meant was, "I don't care for relish (or fill-in-the-word)".

This is the first definition for hate that I came across when looking it up:

to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest: to hate the enemy; to hate bigotry.

Yet, if you do a search on this website for the word hate, you will get 585 experience groups with HATE in the title. It is as if we feel the need to express ourselves in the most extreme terms, or maybe people won't think we really mean it.

If you sit down and really think about it, I'm sure you can come up with plenty of things you dislike, avoid, have an aversion to, but do you have such passionate dislike for it or him or her that you truly "hate" it?

I wish we took our language, our words, more seriously, chose them more carefully. Hardly anyone seems to write to anyone anymore, maybe e-mail and instant messaging have played a part, I'm not sure, but I, for one, don't like the trend.

Words are thought expressed, thoughts are energy, so of course words are very powerful.<br />I was beginning to think I would never quit smoking, but I did, it is 4 months and counting.<br />My family is full of addictive personality types, and what Sparky said about extremes is so true. All the shades of grey in between are where the real beauty lies.

I believe we live in an increasingly extreme culture. We are bombarded by SO much (input overload) that we have to express things in increasingly "escalated" terms in order to make ourselves heard. <br /><br />I don't like the way the word "hate" is being used these days. I can't think of anything I truly "hate," save perhaps for raw tomatoes, at the taste of which I literally vomit, and the inside of my mouth develops a rash... certainly a hateful experience.

To all, thanks for your comments. Sezziy, I pointed out the number of groups on this site with the word hate, just to illustrate a point. I don't think we need:<br />"I HATE green beans" "I dislike green beans" "I feel nausea at the sight of green bean" "I detest green beans"<br /><br />It really wasn't about this site at all. It was about our careless use of language.

Yay, language!!<br /><br />Words are like tiny little responsibilities that flow from peoples mouths...<br />We really should try to be as exact as we can when we are using them.<br />Unless, of course, you are feeling indescribable...